Amplifying the Genius within Organizations
This is a big area of opportunity Social Media offers, far beyond marketing. Ponder, then tell me what do you think?
Are you tired of hearing the coercion to join the Social Media way?
Do the reasons for accepting Social Media not yet fit well with your ideas of business?
Let’s cast aside the apprehensions of risks, any objections and biases, and take a look at other ways your business could effectively leverage Social Media?
Let’s look at the problems your business experiences daily. Perplexing problems can be explored and solved a new way that gets the best out of your employees.
So, now let’s take a mind shift to think about possibilities from an another angle?
If your business could tap into the genius of its employees, what kind of dynamic outcomes could be achieved? What kind of growth? What kind of collaboration and business transformation would result?
If employees willingly collaborated to build a better business and tap into the genius within – what would your business be like? from an employee how could it change? How would you bottom line win even greater? What efficiencies could result?
What if a highly engaged team leveraged their work daily with a range of tools that moved all financial and non-fnancial KPI’s positively?
The real values of Social Media are not necessarily marketing focussed. They are borne of the need to solve a real business problem. It requires a valid solution. To be truly effective, it requires leveraging the new ways to do business, melded with the old that you are so familiar with.
Therefore Social Media is NOT:
- an add-on to digital
- an add-on to marketing
- is not even necessarily silo’ed to marketing
but instead it is a melded set of concepts, ethos and tools. They meet the needs of a well founded business problem or purpose.The ethos of Social Media is so pervasive it is about facilitating culture change.
13 ways to see the business value of Social Media beyond Sales, Marketing, Customer Services and PR:
- Collaboration employee engagement – your employee ‘community’ solves problems, save time
- Recruitment – talent sourcing, credibility checks, outsourcing offshore (e.g. Philipines)
- HR – empower staff, genius tapping, internal comms efficiency
- Security / Online Forensics – NZ exporters already use Social Media to verify global leads from scammers
- Research – New developments research & real time trend sourcing
- Problem solving – externally crowdsourced, collaborative problem solving (21st century focus groups), community ‘advisory board’
- Supplier sourcing – global just-in-time manufacturing suppliers aid NZ businesses
- Transport Logistics e.g. AA Geosmart traffic reports aid transport companies with real-time traffic route data, saving money and time
- Franchise territory mapping – AA GeoSmart Geolocation data software helps franchisors map territories accurately & fairly
- Crowd source product design
- Facilitate product testing
- Fundraising – Not for Profits
- Medical collaborative communities and ‘wikis’ to share medical information and resolve rare disease issues e.g. Univita
Every one of these areas could have potential advantage and disadvantage, depending how it is executed. However it opens our minds to the potential for a business to see the value of Social Media beyond marketing. A business life of Social Media beyond the key 5 Social Media tools. A business life with a whole new way to regenerate itself and see its culture expressed in a fresh way.
The catalyst of inspiration for my thinking was in 2009. A group of 30 or 40 Senior Exectives from well branded companies met to workshop ‘What if a bank were to be community led, how would it conduct itself?’
That is all we were briefed wtih and it was up to us to decide the valid considerations. We examined
- what the community’ & bank partnership experience would be like
- how the interests of the businesses and bank would build a co-operative client-led, market-led service range
- we would all be businesses who are also financial stakeholders in the bank’s shareholdings, lending and profit-sharing
- being both stakeholders and clients, the clients would have a vested interest to mutually support (with a powerful reason for buyer loyalty) through its peer community
- the loyalty would pave the way for greatest potential of lender repayment, business sales and growth potential.
Then we looked at the Best Buys concept of building a powerful internal collaboration. The ethos from that, pervaded the organization into a strong customer service way of ‘being’, not just ‘doing’. The collaboration culture was embedded.
As I’d experienced first hand – the value of Social Media beyond marketing, this workshop experience got me thinking about whole-of-organisation Social Media – Enterprise 2.0 thinking and being. I gave it a risky label – ‘holistic Social Media’. It stuck on my LinkedIn profile for many many months until someone made comment that it was too idealistic to be accepted, understood and in fact could be misunderstood too easily.
Regardless I’ve invested several years looking at the impact on organisations, culture change, on boarding of Social Media and the mental hoops CEOs go through before adopting Social Media.
What positive potential do you see to adopt Social Media in an organisation beyond a marketing perspective?
In your business?
What risks do you see?
Written by Jenny Wilmshurst, TweetTwins Social Media – Social Media Speaker and Consultant
Other articles of interest regarding Social Media ROI, Social Business:
3 Common Social Media Sucess Myths Debunked- truth time
What is Holistic Social Media Consulting?
The Tweet Twins Online World 